Flowering Shrub of the Week: The Camellia

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On Saturday mornings we drop the housing bubble obsession long enough to celebrate a tree or shrub that would brighten almost any garden and improve the value of almost any Los Angeles home. After three weeks of trees, we give you our first flowering shrub: The Camellia.

Why the Camellia? Because we asked photographer Warren Marr, who spent a full year studying and photographing the beautiful Descanso Gardens in La Canada, to choose his favorite tree or plant in the gardens. He paused for a moment, and settled on the Camellias. ‘The flowers are just amazing. And they bloom -- different variations of them bloom -- pretty much year ‘round. And the flowers come in all different colors and different shapes.’

Descanso holds somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 Camellias, mostly in shades of red, white and pink. The photo above is from the garden’s photo collection, not from Warren Marr’s camera -- because, much as he loves Camellias, he wasn’t looking for flowers in the garden. ‘I specifically set out not to take pictures of flowers,’ he told us. ‘Some people will take these close up pictures of flowers, and I didn’t want to do that.’